How do you know if your organic search strategy is working?

When it comes to assessing your organic search strategy, defining clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential. Here’s how defining goals and KPIs can skyrocket your organic search strategy — 1. Define your goals: Whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving conversions, or building community, having specific goals allows you to focus your efforts and limit distraction. 2. Choose relevant KPIs: Once your goals are set, select key performance indicators that align with each objective. Remember that numbers don’t always tell the whole story. If your goal is brand loyalty, KPIs associated with this are priority. Regularly analyzing this data allows you to make informed decisions and achieve better results.

Determining the effectiveness of your organic search strategy involves clear goal-setting and tracking specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Start by identifying your objectives. These could include raising brand awareness, increasing conversions, or boosting customer retention. Following this, select pertinent KPIs such as organic traffic, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, or retention rate. These indicators align with your business goals and provide insight into the performance of your organic search strategy. Tracking these metrics allows you to measure your progress towards your goals and evaluate your return on investment (ROI), thus indicating the success of your organic search strategy.

The best way to determine KPI metrics is to use a framework such as SOSTAC to determine the strategies and objective elements that require clarity before undertaking the tactics required to get the results needed to meet ROI targets. As one example framework SOSTAC stands for: - Situational Analysis - Objectives - Strategy - Tactics - Action - Control Going through each of these sections will help develop a rounded framework for success.

Google Analytics is key for measuring organic traffic. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, keyword performance, and conversions. By analyzing this data, you can optimize keywords and pages to drive more traffic and improve your organic search strategy. Gain a deeper understanding of your audience and make data-driven decisions to achieve better results.

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for gauging and scrutinizing your organic traffic. It provides insights into the number of users accessing your website via organic search, the keywords they're using, the landing pages they're visiting, their dwell time, and their actions on your site. Furthermore, Google Analytics allows you to segment organic traffic based on device, location, behavior, and other variables. This offers a more nuanced understanding of your audience and their preferences. With this information, you can identify the most effective keywords and pages driving organic traffic and conversions, as well as areas requiring optimization. This data-driven approach enables you to refine your organic search strategy effectively.

Google analytics does not always give you the most comprehensive picture when it comes to keywords. Getting your hands dirty with the Google search console may get you more insight from a position, clicks, impressions and CTR. Google analytics will not give any of that unless you pay

GSC is the PERFECT balance of “enough data” and “useful data”. You the get actual important metrics (impressions, clicks, CTR, search queries) worth the seemingly chaotic and overwhelming nature of something like of Google Analytics. There are likely more stories than you know what to do with in GSC (Google Search Console). If your not a master of this platform, it should be your #1 to-do as an SEO professional.

Again I have to vouch for the value of Google Search Console here. Go to the “Performance” tab and click “queries”. You can see all the terms that were searched that your site was shown for. Start here before paying SEMrush!

Also in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools you have the ability to see the keywords where your page appeared but didn't bring a lot of clicks. These keywords are opportunities to work on the on-page SEO and optimize the pages to get better CTR (meta titles, descriptions, titles, internal links e.t.c.) and better positions in the organic results.

If you do not have access to any tool, you can also try the before and after approach and it can give you some indications before you dive deeper. Also, keep a tab on your clicks and other data on your search console and analytics

A/B testing can be useful only when you know the traffic you will get for sure will be close to equal in terms of quality. SEO could be challenging if you are not familiarized yourself with SE content quality guidelines and the avoidance of content duplications. It’s easy to get in trouble.

To gain a deeper understanding of your organic audience and enhance your organic search strategy, utilizing surveys and feedback is invaluable. Let me show you how surveys and feedback can help you gather qualitative data and optimize your organic search efforts. 1. Collect qualitative data: Through surveys and feedback, you can gain insights into various aspects like demographics, goals, challenges, suggestions, etc. 2. Utilize survey tools: Consider platforms like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform, which offer customizable survey templates and easy data collection. 3. Gain audience insights: This data-driven understanding allows you to tailor your organic search strategy and content to better meet their needs and preferences.

If someone would like to add on but not repeat what it’s said above, should mention metrics tools. Especially GA or any other analytics tool will give you a feedback on page view times, entries & exits, keyword that delivered the traffic, funnels, geo searches, etc. These metrics in combination with other tools could replace the challenges of surveying traffic, which practically annoys most people. And choose to skip the pop up.

Its weird when people are talking about SEO as a traffic channel but not talking about business impact. Always remember, SEO is not all traffic, its about how much you are able to contribute to the bottom-line of the business. Another overlooked point is in your chase for traffic and conversion, you do not forget about brand discovery, additional ad impressions (if you have such a business), conversion of unpaid to paid (if lead conversion is not your primary metric).

To determine if your organic search strategy is working effectively, you can monitor and analyze various key performance indicators and metrics. Check organic traffic: Monitor the number of visitors from search engines. Track keyword rankings: See if your target keywords improve their positions. Measure CTR: Ensure your titles and descriptions are appealing to users. Analyze bounce rate: Aim for a lower bounce rate, indicating engagement. Monitor dwell time: Longer times show user interest in your content. Measure conversion rate: See if organic visitors become customers. Track return visitors: Build a loyal audience with repeat visits. Compare competitors: Learn from their successes and weaknesses.

All of the above points are obvious answers (GA4, GSC, SEO Tools, etc), but the ultimate metric is the bottom line... if you're producing a profit. You could perform well in terms of CTR, CTA, and conversions, it may still not be enough to take your business to where it needs to go. And in the end... Google will change its algorithm, and competitors will increase their AdWords bids, you have no control over those things. The solution is to take a holistic approach, create a campaign strategy where you can squeeze the most out of your SEO and paid campaigns while requiring only minimal management. Then check your bottom line and decide if you're losing money.

Success is tied to KPIs directly. But given the ambiguity of the subject and the desired outcome mostly almost never 100% achived, being “patient” with KPI goals will help to achieve results. Little changed are not such helpful in my opinion for SEO, unlike any other channel (direct, paid, offline etc)

Besides GSC don't forget Bing Webmaster Tools. There is a ton of gold information which is also free for everyone to use. Especially when you are trying to check the Technical SEO of a website the combination of those two tools is a great starting point.